'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 09/02/10 02:16 did gyre and gimble: > On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:01 AM, <olin.pulse.7ia at shivers.mail0.org> wrote: >> Bill Cox: >>> While the "right" way is not system-wide mode, in practice, I find >>> system-wide mode to be very stable and usable on Ubuntu systems that >>> have multiple users trying to send sound to the speakers. >> >> So, I'm still wondering: what *is* the "right way" for this use case? Is it >> the case that PulseAudio just doesn't address it? > > There is no right way pulseaudio was not designed to support multiple > users at the same time (without the depreciated exception of running > it as system wide daemon). Indeed. PA is principally meant to be run per-user. Each user logged in will have their own PA process running and each will monitor a system service called "ConsoleKit" which tracks which user is active. We adhere to whatever ConsoleKit tells us with regards to which user is currently "active" (see ck-list-sessions) and only the active user has access to the sound hardware. Think about how switching users works (on Linux and on Windows/OSX). Only the user whose desktop is currently presented will be allowed to use sound, the other user's sound is "corked" until they become active again. That is the *right* way and the default way. If you want something different then you can but you'll have to get your hands a little dirty. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
